What drives Amaro Freitas in life is experience. In 2020 the pianist, who hails from the Northeastern Brazilian coastal city of Recife, was drawn to Manaus, located in the Amazon basin, some 4600 kilometers to the west. His experience in that lush wilderness led him into a new realm of musical creation, one rooted in magic and possibility and tempered by a sense of stewardship for the earth’s bounties and a connection to the Sateré Mawé indigenous community. Crucial to the experience for Freitas was the maintenance of a true exchange of knowledge. According to Freitas, in the resulting album, Y’Y (pronounced: eey-eh, eey-eh), he pays “homage to the forest, especially the Amazon Forest, and the rivers of Northern Brazil: a call to live, feel, respect, and care for nature, recognizing it as our ancestor.”

He continues, “It is also a warning about the need to be aware of the impact we cause, based on the concepts of civilization and modernity that keep us away from this connection, and its importance for the balance of life on the planet.” In addition to serving as a call to nature, Y’Y expresses lessons Freitas learned in the Amazon about the incandescent power of enchanted spirits who intervene on behalf of the community in times of struggle.

Although building an album around an experience so far from his Recife home may seem out of character, in fact the work is fundamentally connected to his previous discography. “Trying to rescue things that came before coloniality”, he notes, is a theme that has been woven into Freitas’s work for years. By simply looking at the titles of his last three projects: Rasif (a colloquial spelling of Freitas’s hometown), Sankofa (a Ghanaian term which roughly translates to “using lessons from the past while moving forward”), and now Y’Y (a word from the Sateré Mawé dialect, an ancestral indigenous code that means water or river), you can see themes that are not spoken in Portuguese or English, but which are part of the construction of a much more connected social concept. It’s no wonder he chose to intwine ancestral knowledge into this project in such a meaningful way.

Parker noted that he first heard Freitas “in Ireland at the Cork Jazz Festival in October of 2021, where we were both performing. He was playing with his trio and I was struck by the complex rhythms and harmonies that he was playing. He was playing in two different meters, a different one in each hand.” He went on to say, “I was flattered to be asked to record a track on his album. The melody for ‘Mar de Cirandeiras’ is so beautiful to play and it was easy to find a nice blend with his piano sounds. I really love the ethereal middle section with the major 7th chords moving in major thirds.”

While Side A of Y’Y serves as an expression of connection to the earth and to the ancestors, Side B serves as proof of connections between the global Black avant-jazz community. Shabaka Hutchings hails from the rich scene in London, harpist Brandee Younger comes from the legendary New York City jazz scene, bassist Aniel Someillan is of Cuban descent, while guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Hamid Drake come from the deep well of avant garde jazz in Chicago. This album is an artful conversation between those traditions, rooted in the unique sounds and rituals found in Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cultures. With Y’Y, Freitas further codifies his fresh, “decolonized” interpretation of Brazilian jazz, one that may well shatter preconceived notions of what jazz can be.